Bunnies and Bears

• My mint plant fell two floors off of my balcony, so I brought it to work where it has been shedding leaves at a rather astonishing rate (although the remaining plant, though smaller and sparser looks relatively happy). I had assumed that this was due to the plant not likely the fluorescent light as much as a real sun (sorry plant, I like the sun too, but my cubicle doesn't come with it), but today noticed that it seems to have a multitude of small green insects all over the stems. My assessment is - aphids. This seems rather poor. I removed a large number of them with a tissue, and am somewhat concerned that I may actually turn out to be so bad at gardening as to kill a mint plant. And, really, mint plants are nearly impossible to kill. Probably it will still do better outside. I'm guessing that the little insects might at least have to deal with cold/predators there. So will the plant, of course, but mints are perennials. And really hard to kill...right? OTOH, in it's current location there's not much chance of any other plants getting infestations...
• Incidental, random aphid fact from wikipedia: "Some aphids have telescoping generations. That is, the parthenogenetic, viviparous female has a daughter within her, who is already parthenogenetically producing her own daughter." That is to say, "they're born pregnant".
• It seems that nobody bothered/was interested/noticed* in the totally trivial puzzle embedded in my last post, so I won't bother coming up with something more interesting/complicated here. 
• I suppose that makes sense given the expected number of readers for any given post in this journal.
• Pictures from PCOC (the origami convention) are starting to come in. See some here.  Some of them even have me in them. :)
• When I start getting wrist pain from computering and such (something alleviated substantially recently by the switch from a mouse to a trackball), I have a tendency to bite my wrists, something that I insist does not qualify as self injury. That said, the other day I noticed I was doing so before lunch and wrapped my wrist to prevent myself from doing it further. The red marks were still very visible at 10 that evening after I had both swum (exercising regularly does more to alleviate this kind of pain than anything else, in my experience) and showered. I'm not sure what this tells us. 
• Losing hair ties I understand. Hair ties are small. I'm a bit more baffled by my ability to lose headbands.
• and now i'm back, but the sun still comes up. the ceiling fell on my head. a molten gooey lollipop, the rest of the kindred. and on and on we go again, I don't know why. and zed. the secrets are, "I cannot tell" "we lie upon the bed" You promised me you'd take me now I feel that I've been led. if up and down then round and round. a purple crayon. so qued.
• I'm not sure how long I'm going to be able to keep up this bullet-point posting thing. There aren't always a sufficient number of interesting things that I want to post about publicly.
• If you've made it this far - let me know if you have any recommendations for: things I should do in the bay area. things I should do in general. knots to learn.

Since it seems that the number of people that reads these lists is just about equal to one

• Went to a coworker's house nov. 5 to watch V for Vendetta. They have cats. I am allergic to cats. This seems to have happened at many different places recently.
• Pacific Coast Origami Convention happened over the weekend. 
  • I hung out with people 
  • "competed" in the "after-dinner entertainment" competition (by invitation only), which consisted of folding a toilet seat cover* (I "folded" an orchid, other notable entries include a toilet, a man to sit on the toilet, and a stall) and an envelope (I folded a penguin, other notable entries include a mailbox and a man sitting on a toilet). 
  • For this I got a free sheet of origamido paper** (I chose blue because it was pretty even though there aren't too many things you can fold that are blue). 
  • I also picked up some nifty folded decorative centerpiece lamps from the dinner. 
  • I am so certain that other people will post their own exhibit photos online that I didn't bother to take any. 
  • My favorite model that I folded the whole weekend was Jared Needle's "Bear 2", his display model can be seen here. I really didn't fold as much as I have at previous conventions, though.
  • Robert Lang, whom everyone was rather jovially referring to as "Bobby J" for some reason (the impression is that he doesn't particularly like the nickname) had a bunch of models in the exhibit that looked like strips of paper woven together in interesting ways. These were created by folding non-square sheets of paper with the aid of a laser cutting to avoid the need for excessive paper creasing. Brian added a model to his exhibit that actually consisted of cut and woven sheets of paper with flavor text that said something along the lines of "folded from one square with no laser computer". It was pretty excellent.
• Been tying lots of knots. no really - lots. Finally just went ahead and bought some more rope online so that I can stop having to untie them all of the time in order to tie new ones. Rope comes in pretty colors, so I am happy.
• California continues. It remains less awesome than Boston. well. Scott and I broke up, but relationships are too complex and personal to describe in a blog, so this is all you get: Distance is the suck.
• The California Academy of Science apparently runs a nightclub on Thursday nights. Science Museum + dj's and dancing + alcohol + science lectures + planetarium shows = what? 
• I haven't been to the nightlife thing, but I have been to the CalAcademy multiple times. Also
  • the Exploratorium, 
  • the Monterey Bay Aquarium (twice), 
  • climbing and camping at Castle Rock (on different occasions), 
  • Point Reyes National Park, Boston (some number of times), 
  • the Maker Faire, 
  • the San Mateo County Fair (actually pretty excellent, and has rides!), 
  • California's Great America amusement park***, 
  • the de Young museum, 
  • a giants game (where I got an awesome free hat), 
  • and I'm sure various other places I'm not thinking of since I moved out to California.
• Going to Taiwan for my Uncle's wedding at the end of the month. Haven't been there in something like 6 years and need to brush up on my Chinese rather badly.
• Somewhat distressingly struck by the observation that we're all getting older all the time
• Eleanor took a picture of my hair after I crown braided it at Stanford Splash. It looks better than I expected.
• Speaking of which, I taught a class on giant origami for Splash. It ended up going quite a bit over and had more than it's share of student drama, but we did end up successfully completing a couple of Yodas out of 9 ft. squares of paper. Pictures of Yoda and Splash in general can be found here. My hair is still in a crown braid for most of these pictures although it is probably getting progressively messier.

I'll be arriving the morning of May 2nd and leaving in the afternoon of May 10th. Ping me!

Since I've been posting to Posterous lately and not so much to other places, I thought that I would go ahead and enable auto-posting from Posterous, so those of you that keep tabs on me from other media (read...basically everybody, since I have almost no friends on Posterous) can see what I'm up to.

Most of my autoposts to livejournal will probably be from my more LJ-like blog at happythoughts.posterous.com,  but I'm also keeping a more media-ful (and potentially more interesting) blog at hawksley.posterous.com. I will probably autopost to facebook from both. (The images are not autoposted behind a cut for LJ and I often upload a bunch of images at a time)

Anyhow, for the two people who want to know what's going on with my life...there you are.

ps. Posterous is awesome.

Looking into my fridge this morning as I packed lunch for the day I noticed that the cherries were in a little ick puddle.
"Ew, have the cherries gone bad already," I thought as I picked the bag up by the corner. But, no, the dripping seemed to be coming from above the cherries...
"Oh shoot! I forgot about the gravlax!" (and apparently also failed to seal it well enough and all of the curing juices were dripping out)

In conclusion,
Gravlax attempt #1:
Successfully Cured? yes
Dill-y? yes
Proper texture? yes
Unpalatably Salty? yes
Still Good? technically

...I threw it out, I guess I could have used it as flavorful salt replacement in something or another, but the saltiness was definitely a bit much. For the next attempt: less salt (the recipe was *per pound*, doh) + less curing time (don't forget about it...)

(That said, it was actually quite good beyond the being way to salty to actually eat, so there *will* be a next time)

Step 1: Climb for the first time in several months
Step 2: Be really sore

...but as to why all the soreness  is constrained to one spot in my mid-back that shouldn't have even really gotten a workout I have no idea.

Send one word at a time, get feedback on which are missing. Even better than ping:

a blue cherry digging elephant finds going 'harumph' is just kaleidoscopically lifelike moreover now other purple quiescent rhododendrons sketchily televise unusually vapid water xylophones yelling 'zenography!'

I really love my tablet PC, but it turns out that a lot of people aren't so big on them. It occurs to me that my fondness for it might be correlated with my tendency to print everything out (including code) when I'm working on something and mark things up on paper...hmm...

When I post to something to Posterous, I like to say that it's been 'posterized'. In conclusion, 'posterize' a new word or what?